Traveling by train in Europe: “Instructions for train travel” – Travel

Assessing the extent of Jaroslav Rudiš’s passion for trains depends entirely on the viewpoint of the judges. If you read his empathic, funny and clever “Instructions for Use for Train Travel”, you can hardly avoid the impression of obsession. However, Rudiš has an old friend and traveling companion who accuses him of being basically dispassionate. Among the railway people there are signal people and station clock people and bridge people. The old friend is therefore a little worried about Rudiš: “He thinks it’s funny that I don’t have any rail specialization, that I’m just a normal, boring, average railroad person.” By the way, the friend is a tunnel person.

As a child, the average railroad man Rudiš had a record with the noises of steam locomotives, and he rented his first apartment in Prague because it was on the tracks leading to the Vrsovice train station. At the window he could chat with train drivers, conductors and travelers when trains had to wait there before they could enter the station. His favorite carriages are the dining car, and Mr Peterka’s one where he even has a regular seat: right behind the door. This Mr. Peterka is a legend on the route between Prague, Berlin and Hamburg, the same applies to Mr. Popovič in his dining car on the route between Vienna and Ljubljana.

Mr. Popovič has a soft spot for the theater and the cinema, he sees his shifts on the train, according to Rudiš, as ideas: “The dining car is his stage. The landscape behind the windows is his stage design. The train noises are his music. He directs, and the travelers are his audience. But also actors who take part in his plays. ” Sometimes Jaroslav Rudiš, who now lives mainly in Berlin, only takes the train to Frankfurt / Oder for an on-board meal. Satisfied, he gets out and drives back.

The book is a brilliant declaration of love to the railroad from a connoisseur and frequent traveler. Rudiš particularly appreciates the old routes and slower connections, he can’t do much with the high-speed ICEs and TGVs. He likes the changes, the detours, the interruptions. He calls the most beautiful of these leisurely stretches his favorite branch lines. And yet he is enthusiastic about the fact that you can get anywhere in Europe from the smallest train station in one day: from Zwiesel to Paris, from Tangermünde to Glasgow, from his birthplace Lomnice to Brussels. Jaroslav Rudiš becomes a fanatic as soon as he’s on a train.

Jaroslav Rudiš: Instructions for use for train travel. Piper Verlag, Munich 2021. 256 pages, 15 euros.

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